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Our Spanish Dream - Part 28: Keyholders Number 3

Date Created: 19.06.2015

So our holiday in October 2011 didn’t get off to a very good start, sacking the keyholders in the first couple of days. We had two weeks to find new ones and get them up to speed. We somehow heard about a new business locally so I emailed the lady. She was away on holiday so couldn’t come and see us until the following week but we made the appointment anyway. In the mean time I sat and put together a full ‘check-list’ for every single room and the outside areas of what we wanted doing before and after every guest. It was very long! The bottom line was simply that we wanted it as clean and presentable as we would like to find it ourselves if we were paying to stay there. We set the bar high.

The next day the air conditioning engineer arrived to service the units. We told him what was going on and he said his wife was looking for a small job and he would mention it to her. We met up, she was very pleasant, I showed her my check list and she took the job on a trial basis over the winter. Knowing she may not be carrying on beyond that we still met the other lady. She was immaculately turned out and I wondered how she could keep her perfect nails so good when she loved cleaning, she was very professional and we liked her. We explained that we had taken on someone over the winter but would like to keep her details in case it didn’t work out.

Our new keyholder was great for two seasons, but a change in her circumstances seriously dropped us in at the deep end when she had to move on short notice out of the area with her husband’s job in December 2013. She was so embarrassed about leaving us in the lurch she just left most of the keys in the house, locked up, sent us an email and posted the front door key back to us! So in January 2014 we were again keyholder-less with a house in Spain and us in the UK!

Dave and Bev Townsend have two homes, their main one in Norwich and a second home in Playa Flamenca in south Costa Blanca, Spain which they also let as a holiday rental www.house-by-the-pool.com. They run a property finding business offering a free service for those seeking to buy a property in the Costa Blanca (Alicante) or the Mar Menor area of the Costa Calida (Murcia) www.SpanishDreamProperty.com. Bev has family in Spain and they intend to move there full-time in a couple of years.